May have, ahem, switched it to easy mode for a couple of boss battles when I got sick of seeing the game over screen. Paid a bit more attention since & getting to grips with the combat & beefing my stuff/stats up.

completed Thomas was Alone - mechanics towards the end kept things interesting, but the plot went nowhere... half the blocks just vanished to be replaced with different ones. Still a nice game at sale price though.

Also 'completed' Papers Please (got two out of the twenty endings - one I was locked up for pissing off my boss). Still highly recommend to anyone who hasn't bought it yet. Might replay in a month or two to try and see if I can help out the EZICs or get the family into Kolechia.

Restarted Arkham Asylum (I'd played a chunk about a year ago, but never completed it) and played a little bit of Cook, Serve, Delicious. Good games.

Saw the Deus Ex game getting rave reviews but can't imagine a FPS would play well on a phone. Does GTA Vice City out of interest? Would be tempted to give that a shot...

Downloaded SCUMMVM for the phone and the Flight of the Amazon Queen files from the site and eventually got it working. Played it for 15 on the way to work as I love those old point n click Monkey Island style adventures. If anyone wants to know how to set it all up, let me know...

The Duke's Archives is a utter bastard. In comparison Lost Izalith is just a bit of a twat, but still a twat nonetheless. New Londo Ruins can be a bit of a shit too though. And don't get me started on The Tomb of the Giants...that's just a straight up cunt.

i only just started uncharted: golden abyss on the vita. and I only got like ten minutes in because I got on the wrong train and had to change quickly. but it's a start. seems alright, doubt i'll use half the touch screen functions when you can just press a button most of the time, but still.

have also got into f1 2013 a bit. started a career with lotus and intentionally put the AI difficulty on a bit too high to try and make it a challenge - had it on too low for a season challenge game and ended up winning most races despite not qualifying half the time. finished my first race 9th, but a bullshit penalty meant I finished 12th or so. think this is as far as I got on 2011 and 2012 before just playing multiplayer instead, so progress definitely being made.

trying to decide whether to get the definitive edition of tomb raider for ps4 too. I have it for the ps3 but never played it (was bought for the mrs who 100% completed it), so could just play that, but I dunno, I like super nice graphics.

it's only 2 hours long but it's probably one of the most charming, and funny, games I've ever played. Seriously good stuff and with steam workshop I expect more challenges to keep me invested, really recommended for someone who wants a heartwarming, challenging and stupid game to kill an afternoon with :)

The best games in the series were on the Megadrive and Saturn consoles, but you can download some of them on more recent consoles (3DS,Wii,Xbox360,PS3), or even on Steam. Shining Force II is the best of the series I have played.

After taking the whole day off to play it, it turned up 15 minutes after I normally get home from work. CHEERS YODEL.

Run down of games I played on it:

- Battlefield 4, easier on next gen, SO pretty and generally better
- War Thunder, nails, pretty but very interesting flight sim
- DC Universe online, mega fun mmo if you don't take it too seriously
- Resogun, eyegasmic explosions
- Don't Starve, creepy but awesome
- Blacklight Retribution, kinda shit
- Killzone, only played 10 minutes but looks like it's been built as a showcase for the PS4. Never a good sign.

Menu system is better than the PS3s but it's not as good as the Xbone. Party chat is a nightmare, we had people are weirdly different volumes and the boxed headset that comes with it is SO uncomfortable. That said, the 360 didn't come with one.

Currently I have an iron pickaxe and a mine that is WELL DEEP. I've gone for a classic 'straight down into the bowels of the earth, climbing back up with an enormous ladder' approach. Just hit a level that contains gold, redstone and diamond all within a few blocks of each other and I'm very excited.
Apparently I need to get a bucket in case I hit lava.

Had got to a point where I was finding it all a bit repetitive to be honest but returned to the storyline and the past 3 or 4 missions have been wicked. Done the whole Buck & ancient Japanese knife storyline now which I enjoyed a lot - felt a lot more like exploring tombs than Tomb Raider did at times. Do wish modern games wouldn't bloody signpost stuff so much though. I think I could have worked out that the giant compass thing goes in the big hole in the door with navigation points on it.

It has made me wonder if I like sandbox games though? Tend to struggle with freedom and a variety of paths and instead of doing hundreds of different things, find one thing I like and just repeat it to death. I think I like my games linear and pretty orchestrated...

There's so much 'to do' (although its debatable how much of it is actually 'fun') that I've really struggled to play through the story. I'm not even convinced that there IS a story to the game. I don’t care about playing golf, or hiking up the mountain, or bmx biking or any of that - give me tank rampages and bank robberies anyday.

I almost think that sandbox games are bad for the industry - trying to ape the real world in video games is not what video games are about, nor has it ever been. Video games have always been about escapism and I struggle to see what imitating the banality of life can achieve.

it's just GTA V chooses to do so and out of all the sandboxes (ignoring all story missions and what have you and other gameplay mechanics) I think GTA V has the dullest sandbox of them all in that it tries so hard to imitate real life it doesn't actually let you do that much in your sandbox apart from simulate real life.

Take this alongside Red Dead Redemption which had such an awesome atmosphere that it was genuinely enjoyable and cathartic to just go off and ride for a little bit, Just Cause 2 is just chaotic and becomes a great game of 'lets play with physics' and Saints Row IV is bloody hilarious especially in multiplayer... then you GTA V and for as good as a game it was it'll be a much much much better game without the open world.

I love them when I'm playing thru the story its ace you can do so much and go all over the place but as soon as thats done I'm not that interested anymore they just fall empty really quick for me. So if I play it again I usualy just start the story again and do other stuff I missed the first time while doing the story. Because fuck collecting a million fragments of a letter or something in GTA when that is all you have left to do, this isn't litter picker simulator 2015.

I'm playing through the 2nd story now (the one with the girl) and my opinions are thus

-> Incredible looking, like seriously one of the best looking games I've ever played.
-> Very funny, the writing is top notch.
-> Very well voice acted

It's really good and you should get it (though maybe wait until both parts are out?) Double Fine as a studio made up of fantastic talented people have never lived up to their potential which was demonstrated by 'Psyconauts' but this game is certainly up their with Nauts in terms of quality. This doesn't feel like a budget title unlike their games post-Brutal Legends and feels a hell of a lot more flushed out, glad Tim has gone back to making adventure games.

got straight back into the swing of things until i got cocky and fought a massive dinosaur thing on my own, and got killed. forgot about the lack of autosaving and lost about 3 hours worth of progress. d'oh

90 mins or so in and it seems very action oriented, which is ok. I didnt buy it on release for this reason. I've come to terms that were never going to get the nerve shredding survival horror of DS1 all over again, but a redux of DS2 is a fine substitute

So thought you might like this. Echoes my thoughts about what made the original so good, largely the sense of isolation and sparseness of the music.

Also, 100% agree with this comment: 'For those moaning about the controls in the classic Tomb Raider games, the main thing to remember is that the entire game-world is laid out in a grid of uniformly-sized blocks - and Lara's movement is also in blocks, despite efforts to hide that. As soon as you understand that, you can tell at a glance which jumps you can make - and which jumps will result in the scrunch of broken bones. Careful-walk to the edge, to align yourself with the edge, step back one block, and go for it. Personally, I really liked the clarity of the block-based maps. Sigh... I'm so old-school.

Anyway, those of us who played - and completed - the original Tomb Raider back on the PS1 were truly hardcore. I salute you all. You see, on the console version you had to return to fixed (and punishingly infrequent) save-points if you wanted to save your game - none of this namby-pamby where's-my-mummy save-before-every-jump safety-net stuff that the PC port offered. When you died on the PS1 version, you stood to lose a significant amount of progress - so most jumps were genuinely tense, clammy-controller affairs. Which is absolutely as it should be. '

Funny though, the controls for those games get universal hatred yet for me created the tension and drama. Making a jump in TR and avoiding a bear attack was properly heart pounding. The new game, as much as I loved it, was always really clearly signposted and did the jumping for you.

Let's face it, a large amount of the original Tomb Raider's popularity can be attributed to a pubescent male gaming demographic and massive polygonal bazongas. I thought there were much better third-person games around in the era (Heretic II for example).

A pair of triangular titties. TR1 was jst an incredible game all round, combat was shit by todays standards but it was an adventure game at heart and about the environments and the discovery of it all. The lost valley for one was awesome.

TR2 tho was the nuts. Played that again a few years back and it was still mint

The most complete version in terms of extra content and definitely controls better with the Wiimote. No doubt the PS3/360 versions will probably look a bit better since they came out though. Enjoyed it, even though I'd played the GC one.

My experience of the Wii remote is basically that of a mouse if I had the shakes and 10 cups of coffee before that. The Move controller on the other hand was actually fucking brilliant for Killzone but even that being said the mouse and keyboard is always the most accurate way to control an FPS.

Mouse rules with keyboard but it's all too accurate and perfect for my liking. FPS shooters on PC don't feel 'real' because of how slick they are, whereas FPS with 2 sticks is like trying to align two complex gears that don't want to marry up. The wiimote got the balance just right for me, allowed you to turn and aim accurately like a mouse but with the removing of that stupidly unrealistic turn speed.

The controls for Goldeneye & COD were shit unless you tweaked them though.

I'd imagine some of the ropey early implementations and dodgy defaults go some way to explaining why some of those who tried the wii scheme hated it so much. Odd though, because Metroid Prime was a fairly early release and it more or less nailed it, as IMHO does RE4 for the Third-Person Shooter.

Pretty good dog fight sim, with a good pace. Bit tricky to grasp at first but I think I'm getting there, terrible menu system port that needs the PS4 trackpad (not perfect to be honest) but still playable.

but I stopped playing after about alpha 6 and I'm now waiting for the actual release. It's plenty playable at the moment, but there are still bugs around and unfinished game mechanics, so it may be worth laying off for a bit.

and you should go that way. The catacombs contain some useful stuff but it's a pain to get through at that stage and it's nothing you can't do without. New Londo ruins are definitely not worth going through yet.

Another option is to go through darkroot garden and if you can afford the thingy (can't remember what it's called, the blacksmith sells it for 20k) to to open the door you can adventure around there for a bit. There are some bosses and useful loot to be had that aren't too tricky (comparatively..)

I basically got stuck on Sif for ages, took a 3 month Dark Souls sabbatical to play GTA, came back and beat Sif first time on my own. You can't quantify that kind of joy/relief.

I've actually been playing it for a stupid amount of time for how far through I seem to be, went back to the prison and got the rusty ring (!) so I could beat the hydra in Darkroot Basin. Can't think what else I've really done.

Did some of The Depths last night actually - pretty smooth sailing so far. I'll go to Blighttown that way instead of through the Valley of Drakes then.

I got to it via the Darkroot Basin->Valley of Drakes route. Decided against going that way eventually for some reason, probably because the game gives you no indication that that's the way to go. Fucking game.

My playthrough has basically been a series of balls ups. Missed the Estus flask on the first level and got all the way through Undead Burg/Parish and half of Darkroot Garden with no way to heal myself (I've only just figured out how to use magic, incidentally). That was challenging.

So long as you manage to find the bonfire. Which is tucked away in a cave you have to wade through a poisonous swamp to get to. Via the depths is an unholy pain in the arse, but there's a boss to kill and some loot to be had.

No Estus? Sweet jesus. Even the nutjobs who do deprived playthroughs at level 1 for the whole game pick up the Estus. Impressive stuff.

number one was really suprisingly good, I might just wait until its all there though and do it all at once or near enough, becuase I really can't remember what just happened in the first one and I only played it at xmas.

Is it worth playing, never heard of it until Burial said he wants to release more music before the second one is out because he wont get anything else done after that for a while. Should I go play them while waiting for new Burial? Or is it as I fear from the name, the usual dragons and shit? Or am I wrong and it is the usual dragons and shit but really fucking good dispite that?

I really enjoyed it, but didn't get that far. If I'm totally honest I prefered Dragon's Dogma. It was a half way house between being hard with good combat (climbing up two story ogres to stab them in the head) to having a good narrative I cared about.

out of pretty much anyone who sticks with it past the first few hours. It's a fantasy setting but it's got a dingy, oppressive style all its own. It harks back to a time when progress in a game involved rote learning of attack patterns, like Strider (though aesthetically a million miles away obviously, and with Zelda-like exploration elements).

I've not played much of it but I've been slowly hacking my way through its predecessor Demons Souls for the best part of two years, and I'm not sure I could do that to myself all over again...

I may well be in, I do come from the olden days when games where harder and I've not really been challenged by anthing I've played for years so yeah. I'm usualy not into fantasy stuff so that might be the downfall, but I'm open to naything really, loads of games look like shit from the outside and play so well it doesn't matter where they're set.

Doubt they'll get canned. Not in Nintendo's interests to shaft 4m of their core fans and kill off the Wii U for at least 18 months.

It's typical of Nintendo's PR for most of their games though - announce something about a century in advance, then go silent on it before announcing the release date a couple of weeks before it's in the shops and trying to hype it over the space of a week. Even the Smash Bros campaign's fucking awful this time around, and that's one they did pretty well last generation.

But to my knowledge, there have been no official videos of Bayonetta 2 and only 1 of X. For two games that - to me - would be a huge draw and pique the interest of many current PS3 / xbox360 owners thinking about their next move, they're doing an even more terrible job at promoting them than usual.